High throughput experiments (HTE) are extremely important in developing and improving processes for different application fields such as in the chemical or pharmaceutical industry. In particular HTE for zeolite synthesis, metals loading and reactor performance evaluation are required for developing and improving processes for the manufacturing of fuels, lubes and other advanced chemicals.
Up to now, efforts to evaluate new zeolites and catalysts derived therefrom have been limited because of the amount of starting material required to properly form extrudates. Catalyst extrusion, as conventionally practiced, requires at least 100 grams of material in order to properly prepare extrudates starting from powders. Typically, three steps are involved: 1) mixing of the dry powders, 2) mulling of the powders with added liquid and turning it into an extrudable paste, and 3) extrusion into the desired shape.
For small quantities of available catalyst material, usually dry pressing of the powders into pellets may be used, followed by breaking the pressed pellet and sizing it appropriately to accommodate into the reactor. The dry pressing at high pressure (about 10,000 psig or about 69 MPag) may compromise the catalyst pore structure and hence hamper reaction analysis and catalyst scalability. Also, dry pressing may hamper the interaction of the individual components in the mixing/mulling and extrusion processes. In addition, dry pressing is often limited in throughput because catalyst formation is ad-hoc, time consuming and labor intensive. Moreover, being a manual operation, it is also highly operator-dependent, which is an unwanted variability.
Therefore there is a need for a method that can overcome at least some of the above-mentioned drawbacks, by replacing the manual labor and the unwanted variability introduced by the operator and the variable quality of the formed catalyst support. Existing tools can only reliably process relatively high amounts of catalysts (e.g., amounts above 100 g), which are too large to consider processing samples in high throughput experiments. There is thus a need for a tool and a method that would allow properly mixing and/or mulling of small amounts of samples.